Exit Part One- Arrival at Exit

So, it has been a little while since our last addition to our travel diary, but I must profess that it is not through neglect, or disrespect of you, our valued reader (note the use of singular, rather than plural here). We have indeed, been very busy over the last fortnight or so. To begin we left what had become our home away from home in Budapest, on an adventure that would later be affectionately looked back to as the Exit Music Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia.

This adventure inevitably began with a bus trip direct from the Airport to Novi Sad, but you could hardly call the many twists and turns that our geriatric driver took as direct, as he attempted to avoid every toll road out of Budapest, and thus added a number of hours to the trip. This should have rang some warning bells for us for our bus trip out of Serbia to Dubrovnik, Croatia in a weeks time, but hey, we had a festival to get to. So us, our bus with no air conduli and 39 odd poms to whinge about this fact were off, and racing (if not slowly) toward Novi Sad.

Our first minutes at Novi Sad were met with a stroke of luck and our wayward travelling friends Tommy and Teddy on arrival at the gate of the camp-ground, a truly amazing feat amongst the 100 000 odd other revelers who were descending on the town. So we sat around and enjoyed a couple of litres of top quality "bull´s blood" wine from Eger (see the last story), before making our way out and meeting a few of the locals in the town square (Novi Sad metal-heads, right). Teddy may or may not have played a bit of a Velvet Underground duet with a local mandolin playing busker, who did a bang up job of following Ted´s lead, considering the guy didn´t know who the Velvet Underground were.

So that was day one, and day two drifted by looking up to the sky from our camp, fighting a losing battle against the tide of geezers setting up, as we tried to save our late-coming friends a space. This battle was lost, with the crew arriving in dribs and drabs over the next 12 or so hours, but we all found one-another, and spent day three together, down by the not-so-blue Danube (we have since found out that it is advisable to wash after swimming in it). This, along with many-a Baltic Vodka (very very cheap), had us set up for the first night of this four night festival, and my god, was it going to be big.

To Be Continued...